Monday, November 10, 2014

Iraq snapshot

Monday, November 10, 2014. Chaos and violence continue, a Canadian busybody cries for his lover Barack, Jon Stewart takes on Barack's latest outrage (more US troops sent to Iraq), Brett McGurk continues to think he works for the Defense Dept, Iraq War veteran Tomas Young passes away, and more.

If you're the Christian Science Monitor, you can't do actual reporting so you have to find 'click bait.' You can read the latest garbage from the paper by clicking here and going to Yahoo (thereby not giving CSM a click for their 'click bait').

A busy body by the name of Richard Brunt wonders -- from Canada -- what were Americans thinking last Tuesday?

I believe I've said this already but tend to your own gardens.

I really don't give a s**t what some Canadian thinks of American elections.

I don't make a point to stick my nose into their elections.

But for someone that thinks something awful took place, exactly how long is Canada going to keep conservative Stephen Harper on as prime minister?

And are you ever going to get off your lazy asses and demand that asylum be granted to War Resisters?

And what about fracking? Isn't that your leading export of late: Socially damaging policies?

Speaking of, how far along have you gotten with regards to addressing the very real complaints of indigenous peoples in Canada?

What's that?

You just want to talk about how "groovy" you think Barack Obama looks in sun glasses?

Well just because you're letting the precum pool in your pants doesn't mean you need to share your erotic fantasies with the rest of us.

Brunt's so busy jizzing while moaning Barack, he actually writes, "Obama brought soldiers home from Iraq."

Apparently, Brunt's been too busy jacking off to light bondage fantasies of Barack disciplining him to pay attention to actual events in the real world -- including the fact that 'Operation Inherent Resolve' has already claimed the lives of 2 American service members.

While Brunt sees accomplishments worth bragging of, the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman seems less inclined to shine it on, "The United States is still involved in a 13-year-old war in Afghanistan,
and President Barack Obama has undertaken a new one against Islamic
State in Iraq and Syria, just three years after he withdrew the last of
our troops from Iraq. The administration is also carrying on a drone
missile campaign -- which looks eerily like war from the receiving end
-- in Pakistan and Yemen."

Brunt also seem to forget that his own government is taking part in the bombing of Iraq.

Maybe if he spent a little less time trying to trash the American people for how they voted (or not voted -- most Americans eligible to vote elected not to vote in last Tuesday's elections), he'd be able to effect some change in his own government?

Or at least not appear so pathetic and envious that he obsesses over his neighbors instead of living his own life.

Or ignorant of what's going on in Iraq, how the Iraqi people continue to suffer and how Barack keeps sending in more US troops.

What Brunt avoids, Jon Stewart took on in tonight's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central). Excerpt:US President Barack Obama September 18th: I want the American people to understand how this effort will be different from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: It will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soilJon Stewart: Yes! If American troops are going to be fighting, they're going to be fighting on our soil! Against . . . Wait a minute. It's comforting to hear our president say on national television there will be no combat troops in Iraq.News Anchor, November 7th: Today, President Obama authorized the deployment of 1,500 more US troops to Iraq to help with the fight against ISIS.Scott Pelley, November 7th: With this expansion, the number authorized has grown from 275 in June to 3100 tonight.Jon Stewart: What the f[bleep]! You said no troops in Iraq! And in five months we've increased the number of US troops in Iraq by ten times. At this rate, by 2016, everyone in the world will be in Iraq fighting ISIS! We're going to have to recruit people from ISIS to fight ISIS. And those troops are boots on the ground! You said no boots on the ground! The ground would get no boots!Barack, September 18th: The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission in Iraq. Their mission is to advise and assist our partners on the ground. Jon Stewart: Oh, I'm sorry, that's my mistake. I'm sorry. So it's not 3,000 troops, it's 3,000 advisors. Okay. Well, you know, that's a lot of advice.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, for more, we go to Raleigh, North
Carolina, where we’re joined by Matthew Hoh, senior fellow at the Center
for International Policy, former State Department official who resigned
in protest from his post in Afghanistan over the U.S. policy there in
September 2009. Prior to his assignment in Afghanistan, Matthew Hoh
served in Iraq. From 2004 to ’05, he worked with a State Department
reconstruction and governance team in Salah ad-Din province. And from
2006 to ’07, he worked as a Marine Corps company commander in Anbar
province.

Matthew Hoh, welcome back to Democracy Now! Can you share your response to the increased boots on the ground?

MATTHEWHOH:
Hi, good morning, and thank you for having me on. My response is, as
many people, I think, in the United States, scratching their head and
wondering: What are we doing? What does the United States government
really think it’s going to accomplish by putting more American troops
into the middle of the Iraqi civil war and into the middle of the Syrian
civil war, particularly coming off of 13 years of war in Afghanistan,
in Iraq, in Libya, in Somalia, in Yemen, etc.? So, my response, Amy, is
more or less the same as most people’s, of a—very concerned and, you
know, lack of a better phrase, this is crazy.

AMYGOODMAN: Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation, President Obama insisted U.S. troops will focus on training Iraqis to fight ISIS and coordinating airstrikes, rather than engaging in active combat.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA:
What hasn’t changed is, our troops are not engaged in combat.
Essentially what we’re doing is we’re taking four training centers, with
coalition members, that allow us to bring in Iraqi recruits, some of
the Sunni tribes that are still resisting ISIL,
giving them proper training, proper equipment, helping them with
strategy, helping them with logistics. We will provide them close air
support once they are prepared to start going on the offense against ISIL. But what we will not be doing is having our troops do the fighting.

AMYGOODMAN: President Obama refused to rule out further increases in U.S. troops in Iraq.

PRESIDENTBARACKOBAMA:
As commander-in-chief, I’m never going to say never, but what, you
know, the commanders who presented the plan to me say is that we may
actually see fewer troops over time, because now we’re seeing coalition
members starting to partner with us on the training and assist effort.

AMYGOODMAN: That is President Obama on CBS’s Face the Nation. Matthew Hoh, do you believe what he’s saying?

MATTHEWHOH:
No, I don’t. And I think it’s very easy for us to revisit this in a few
months’ time, just as now we’re revisiting this from several months
ago, and see the increase, the graduation of entry of American forces
back into the conflict. But I think it’s a slippery slope—excuse me—and
that very quickly this will spin out of control for the United States.
What happens when American troops are killed? What happens when we lose
several young men to a suicide bomber? How is the president going to
react to that? How is the United States going to react when our troops
are in combat and we only have 3,000? And the president, who can’t seem
to face down the same critics in Congress who are always demanding for
war, the John McCains and Lindsey Graham, how is he going to face them
down then, if he can’t face them down now? So, I don’t believe his
words, and I think that this is going to be the beginning of an
unfortunate and tragic re-entry of America back into this civil war.

Reuters reports, "The United States has deployed a team of about 50 troops to an air base
in Iraq's fiercely contested Anbar province to lay the groundwork for an
advisory mission at the core of its campaign against Islamic State militants, officials said on Monday." All Iraq News quotes Sha'aban al-Obaidi, Commander of the Emergency Police, declaring, "The US trainers arrived at Assad Military Base in Anbar and met with the security leaders."

While the US only sent tools of war, National Iraqi News Agency reports Jordan's King Abdulla II sent a plane to Anbar today "loaded with large quantities of humanitarian aid, including food supplies and blankets to help the Iraqi people." Petra notes, "The aid was sent as part of efforts to boost cooperation between Jordan and Iraq, and alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people in view of the current situation in their country."

Of Barack's actions passed off as a 'plan,' Ivan Eland (Antiwar.com) weighs in with this take:Although ISIS is not strictly an insurgent (guerrilla) force, because the group
has some heavy weapons and infrastructure, it has made gains despite U.S. airstrikes
on these obvious targets. And since the objective of U.S. and Iraqi strategy is
to eventually drive ISIS fighters to ground in cities like Mosul and then to
cut off their supplies and reinforcements from Syria using U.S. airstrikes, some
ground force will be needed to go into these built up areas, conducting house-to-house
counterinsurgency operations to root out the group. Right now that falls to
the Shi’ite-dominated Iraqi Army and the Kurdish pesh merga militias. Yet these
are the same forces that, despite years of training and equipping by the United
States, have fared poorly against ISIS.To improve these forces, the United States has already sent about 1,400 military
advisers, but so far they have advised at only relatively high levels of the
Iraqi Army. To be effective, more advisers will be needed to go into the field
with Iraqi and Kurdish forces and also call in U.S. airstrikes. The United States
already will ramp up the number of advisers to 3,100. When the United States
originally invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, proponents decried comparisons to the
Vietnam War, but of course, both wars have turned out to be much longer quagmires
than even U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And the recent American adventure back
into Iraq and into Syria also is beginning to resemble escalation in Vietnam.
U.S. air power failed to bring the enemy to heel, so more and more American combat
"advisers" are being added to fight along side friendly local forces.
In these situations, once the nation starts down the escalation slope, American
prestige is on the line and when lesser measures don’t work, overwhelming political
pressure is brought to bear on the president by the political and foreign policy
elite to escalate the conflict.

In Vietnam, there was never much public pressure to escalate the war, because
most Americans in the early 1960s didn’t even know where Vietnam was on a map.
Yet it happened anyway. In this case, the American people were horrified at
ISIS’s beheadings of Americans in retaliation for U.S. airstrikes against the
group and reflexively wanted something done about it; but after the long quagmires
in Afghanistan and Iraq, public opinion doesn’t want significant U.S. ground combat
troops added. Thus, one could foresee such American forces gaining in number,
after local forces don’t perform well, but never shedding the label "advisers."

James Cogan (WSWS) offers this take on the recent events:President Barack Obama announced during a joint press conference with
Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday that he has requested
US allies to send additional military forces to the war in Iraq and
Syria. Appearing with Abbott in Beijing during the Asia-Pacific Economic
Cooperation (APEC) summit, Obama stated: “I am having conversations
with Australia and other coalition partners that have already committed
to putting trainers in how they can supplement and work with us in this
overall effort.”The US-led intervention was launched in August on
the pretext of destroying the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS),
which had taken control of significant areas of northern and western
Iraq, and much of eastern Syria. After last week’s mid-term
congressional elections, during which the war was barely mentioned,
Obama quickly announced the doubling of US ground troops working with
Iraqi government forces, from 1,500 to over 3,000. At least 7,000
mercenary contractors are also involved, along with war planes carrying
out daily attacks inside Iraq and Syria.Obama’s statement
yesterday signals a further escalation of the war. While initially
focussed on ISIS, the intervention’s longer-term goal is ousting the
Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad and installing an American
client state. ISIS and other Islamic fundamentalist militias have waged a
brutal civil war against Assad’s government since 2011. They have
received significant aid from US allies such as Turkey and the Gulf
states, with Washington’s knowledge and support. It was not until ISIS
posed a danger to the stability of the US puppet government in Iraq that
ISIS was demonised as the world’s greatest terrorist threat.

Turning to a tale of two Vice Presidents . . .

Iraq has three vice presidents: Ayad Allawi, Osama al-Nujaifi and thug and former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Two were in the news today.

Nouri, of course, didn't visit with Christian refugees. He spent so much of his second term multiplying their numbers by refusing to protect them. That's why so many fled Baghdad during his second term -- some went to northern Iraq, some left the country. It's doubtful he'd be well received should he show his face in a refugee camp.

QUESTION: And I just wondered if you’d also seen a report out
of Tehran today that the vice president – or one of the vice presidents
has said that Iran would be ready to help to all of its abilities in
Iraq, to help the Iraqi Government with all its abilities to fight ISIL.
I know that there’s been some discussion about Iran’s role here, but
would that be something that you would welcome?MS. PSAKI: I’m not sure what exactly the minister meant by his
comments. Our concerns haven’t changed. Obviously, while there’s a role
every country can play, and the Secretary himself has said that, we
have expressed concern and our concerns remain about Iran’s activities
in Iraq. We believe that Iran’s leaders can choose to continue to
contribute to the current – we believe they continue to contribute to
the current instability by backing unregulated militias in Iraq and
elsewhere in the region. We believe these actions have contributed
significantly to the sectarian conflict. And we are aware that some
Iranian active – or operatives are inside Iraq training and advising. We
remain concerned about this, and it’s certainly not something that we
are encouraging.

While Allawi (and possibly Nouri) worked on diplomacy, the US State Dept's Brett McGurk continued to confuse his position with a Defense Dept posting.

National Iraqi News agency reports on the meet-up here. Where's that political solution Barack used to swear was what Iraq needed and what would solve the conflict in Iraq?

He appears to have forgotten about it.

Meanwhile, it was just last month that Susan Rice went on NBC's Meet The Press to insist Barack's 'plan' was a success and to offer an example, the August 'rescue' of the Yazidis trapped on Mount Sinjar.

No sooner had the words flown out of her lying mouth than came news that hundreds of Yazidi families were still trapped, all these months later, on Mount Sinjar.

On the eve of Veterans Day in the US comes news that Iraq War veteran Tomas Young has passed away. RT notes:

Tomas Young enlisted in the military two days after 9/11 because
he wanted to strike back at those responsible for the attack on
America. Instead of being deployed to Afghanistan after joining
the Army, he was deployed to Iraq. He was shot in the chest and
paralyzed during an insurgent attack in Sadr City just a few days
after beginning his tour of duty.
His injuries resulted in quadriplegia, paralysis from the neck
down. Young became a significant critic of the war in Iraq –
during which 4,488 soldiers and Marines died in Iraq and 30,000
were wounded – and an early member of Iraq Veterans Against the
War advocacy group.

His passing has been widely noted on Twitter including in the following Tweets:

About Me

We do not open attachments. Stop e-mailing them. Threats and abusive e-mail are not covered by any privacy rule. This isn't to the reporters at a certain paper (keep 'em coming, they are funny). This is for the likes of failed comics who think they can threaten via e-mails and then whine, "E-mails are supposed to be private." E-mail threats will be turned over to the FBI and they will be noted here with the names and anything I feel like quoting.
This also applies to anyone writing to complain about a friend of mine. That's not why the public account exists.